I’ve been using command line for zipping and ‘tarring’ for a while and never really needed to exclude directories from the archive.
I had to do this today and I worked out that I had to use absolute paths to achieve this.
The following examples will exclude multiple directories from tar and zip archives respectively:
tar -cvf documents.tar.gz /home/user/Documents --exclude "/home/user/Documents/exclude1" --exclude "/home/user/Documents/exclude2"
zip -vr -9 documents.zip /home/user/Documents -x "/home/user/Documents/exclude1" -x "/home/user/Documents/exclude2"
Marko